Tuesday, March 18, 2008

My husband is a big history buff and the moment they started advertising the movie 10,000 B.C., he wanted to see it. I tried to explain to him that I did not believe it was a historical documentary, but it did not matter, this was a movie we must see and we must see it in the theater on the big screen. As a chef, he normally works evenings and weekends, but he had this past weekend off, so we took in a Saturday matinee.

10,000 B.C. is a feast for the eyes to say the least. The aerial views were fantastic and the cinematography was stunning. A couple of weeks ago, I watched for the "severalth" time, Chocolat, with Juliette Binoche. I loved how they played with color in that film, basically an unobtrusive setting of bluish greys but then they throw in a brilliant splash of red with her shoes. They play with color the exact same way in this movie, but it is a sea of sand with a burst of red flowing through it. That was my favorite part of the whole show. The special effects with the prehistoric creatures were also amazing. Although, where I thought they did a great job making the woolly mammoths stampedes look real, for some reason the scenes with the saber tooth tiger did not appear as realistic to me, like a Photoshop scene gone bad. I am sure there is some graphical reasoning on why it was harder to work the saber tooth tiger animation in vs. the woolly mammoths, one of which once my illustrator reads this will try to explain it to me. But overall, like I had heard, it was very much an eye-candy movie.

Now as far as historic relevance, in the whole reason my husband wanted to go see it, uh, yeah. For those of you who feel that even a fictional story of prehistoric times should have some bearing on fact and/or geography, perhaps this would not be a movie for you (my husband would fall into this camp), for others who can bypass facts for fantasy and enjoy a good B flick movie every now and then, than here is one your eyes will also enjoy.

10,000 B.C. centers around a tribe that my husband and I referred to as the Dreadlock clan, who were mighty woolly mammoth hunters, and may I add, at times, spoke remarkable modern day English. This clan’s leader was “mother”, a woman who has visions of the future and when a blue-eyed orphan girl, Evolet, was brought to her, “mother” knew the girl was destined to fulfill a prophecy to save her people. At the same time a small boy of the clan, D’Leh, falls in love with Evolet. Many moons passed quickly and the boy and girl are now grown.

Then, whom my husband and I referred to as the Medieval Knight clan, arrived in the dead of winter on their 4-eyed demons and ransacked the village, capturing several of the Dreadlock clan including Evolet. Despite “mother” not thinking he is brave enough, D’Leh took off with the remaining Dreadlock clansmen to rescue his true love and unknowing to him, become part of the prophecy.

His pursuit led him over snow packed mountains in blizzard conditions, through a tropical rainforest where he was attacked by giant ostriches, and to a desert where he was almost eaten by a saber tooth tiger before being joined by the Balled Headed clan, the Weird Tree Mask clan, the Huge Horn in the Chin clan and the Bamboo Wearing clan. These clans had also been invaded by the Medieval Knight clan, and joined D’Leh on his mission to rescue all their people.

After being lost in the desert for days, they finally arrived at their enemy’s doorstep. Turns out the Medieval Knight clan were working for the Dynasty Emperor clan. They were bringing them slaves to build the evil emperor a great pyramid.

Again, if you are going to be a stickler for historical time frames and geography in addition to perhaps frowning upon a little sprinkling of supernatural in here and there, this might not be your movie. However, if you enjoy a little fun or in my husband’s words, cheesy fantasy, once in awhile as well as incredible cinematography, then this might be one to check out.

As we were leaving the theater, we over heard one guy say to the other it was not worth the $5, maybe $2.50, but not $5; the other guy disagreed and thought it was well worth the $5. I enjoyed it, but I will admit, part of my enjoyment was just watching my history buff husband’s expressions all during the show.